Susan Cain - Bittersweet : How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

One night, I dreamed that I was meeting my friend, a poet named Mariana, in Sarajevo, the city of love. I woke up confused. Sarajevo, a symbol of love? Wasnt Sarajevo the site of one of the bloodiest civil wars of the late twentieth century?

Then I remembered.

Vedran Smailovi.

The cellist of Sarajevo.

Its May 28, 1992, and Sarajevo is under siege. For centuries, Muslims, Croats, and Serbs have lived together in this city of streetcars and pastry shops, gliding swans in parkland ponds, Ottoman mosques and Eastern Orthodox cathedrals. A city of three religions, three peoples, yet until recently no one paid too much attention to who was who. They knew but they didnt know; they preferred to see one another as neighbors who met for coffee or kebabs, took classes at the same university, sometimes got married, had children.

But now, civil war. Men on the hills flanking the city have cut the electricity and water supply. The 1984 Olympic stadium has burned down, its playing fields turned into makeshift graveyards. The apartment buildings are pockmarked from mortar assaults, the traffic lights are broken, the streets are quiet. The only sound is the crackling of gunfire.

Until this moment, when the strains of Albinonis Adagio in G Minor fill the pedestrian street outside a bombed-out bakery.

Do you know this music? If not, maybe you should pause and listen to it right now: youtube.com/watch?v=kn1gcjuhlhg. Its haunting, its exquisite, its infinitely sad. Vedran Smailovi, lead cellist of the Sarajevo opera orchestra, is playing it in honor of twenty-two people killed yesterday by a mortar shell as they lined up for bread. Smailovi was nearby when the shell exploded; he helped take care of the wounded. Now hes returned to the scene of the carnage, dressed as if for a night at the opera house, in a formal white shirt and black tails. He sits amidst the rubble, on a white plastic chair, his cello propped between his legs. The yearning notes of the adagio float up to the sky.

All around him, the rifles fire, the shelling booms, the machine guns crackle. Smailovi keeps on playing. Hell do this for twenty-two days, one day for each person killed at the bakery. Somehow, the bullets will never touch him.

This is a city built in a valley, ringed by mountains from which snipers aim at starving citizens in search of bread. Some people wait for hours to cross the street, then dart across like hunted deer. But heres a man sitting still in an open square, dressed in concert finery, as if he has all the time in the world.

You ask me am I crazy for playing the cello in a war zone, he says. Why dont you ask THEM if theyre crazy for shelling Sarajevo?

His gesture reverberates throughout the city, over the airwaves. Soon, itll find expression in a novel, a film. But before that, during the darkest days of the siege, Smailovi will inspire other musicians to take to the streets with their own instruments. They dont play martial music, to rouse the troops against the snipers, or pop tunes, to lift the peoples spirits. They play the Albinoni. The destroyers attack with guns and bombs, and the musicians respond with the most bittersweet music they know.

Were not combatants, call the violinists; were not victims, either, add the violas. Were just humans, sing the cellos, just humans: flawed and beautiful and aching for love.

A few months later. The civil war rages on, and the foreign correspondent Allan Little watches as a procession of forty thousand civilians emerges from a forest. Theyve been trudging through the woods for forty-eight hours straight, fleeing an attack.

Among them is an eighty-year-old man. He looks desperate, exhausted. The man approaches Little, asks whether hes seen his wife. They were separated during the long march, the man says.

Little hasnt seen her but, ever the journalist, asks whether the man wouldnt mind identifying himself as Muslim or Croat. And the mans answer, Little says years later, in a gorgeous BBC segment, shames him even now, as he recalls it across the decades.